Heimkino [Amateurfilm]

An amateur film from the late 1960s that shows holiday scenes. Whether the local dogs, the Mediterranean landscape or cheerful people enjoying leisure pastimes: the filmmaker captured everything that passed by his lens with his Super 8 camera. The images appear not to have been subjected to any directorial strategy; their seemingly random selection obeys no narrative structure in the classic sense. Mischa Kuball ruminates here on the popular attempt to preserve irreclaimable experiences in order to relive them later in home movies. But the effort to make memories come to life at will using technical means is doomed to fail: the past cannot be brought back to life again, even with the help of home movies. The ad absurdum repetition of the images in a loop manifests the impossibility of this undertaking. Like a veil of forgetting, a black shadow looms over the private footage in Kuball's video. It belongs to the projector, whose presence physically demonstrates the temporal and personal distance of the viewer from the images shown. Heimkino [Amateurfilm] is about the technical processes of recording and playback. Filming the film as an artistic act creates a meta-level and offers a complex reflection on the cinematic medium. (Cécile Zachlod)

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